Free Republic

Critics of the agreement with Iran concerning its nuclear program are right about most things but wrong about the most important things. They understand the agreement’s manifest and manifold defects and its probable futility. Crucial components of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure remain. U.S. concessions intended to cultivate the Iranian regime’s “moderates” are another version of the fatal conceit that U.S. policy can manipulate other societies. As is the hope that easing economic sanctions would create an Iranian constituency demanding nuclear retreat in exchange for yet more economic relief. Critics are, however, wrong in thinking that any agreement could control Iran’s nuclear...

GEORGE WILL: Someone has to tell the president it's not clever to be seen trying to be clever. In all the prevarications and the equivocations of politics, one tries to be economical in the use of the word lie. That's why Churchill once said an opponent was guilty of terminological inexactitude. Well, it's hard to avoid the feeling that even if the president really didn't know on September 26th what was going to happen on the first of October, now he knows what he actually said then, and he's not telling the truth about what he said then. In the...

On Tuesday’s “Special Report” on the Fox News Channel, Washington Post columnist George Will said supporters of President Barack Obama’s 2010 Affordable Care Act are bending over backward to justify the law’s expanding disaster, particularly Obama’s broken promise that consumers would be able to keep health insurance plans they like. Will pointed to remarks from House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer earlier in the day, who said Obama should have “caveated” his promises made in selling Obamacare. “As a result, the supporters of Obamacare are pioneering new dimensions of sophistry,” Will said. “Steny Hoyer, the second ranking Democrat in the House,...

<p>When William F. Buckley, running as the Conservative Party’s candidate for mayor of New York in 1965, was asked what he would do if he won, he replied: “Demand a recount.” Robert Sarvis, Libertarian Party candidate for governor of Virginia, will not need to do this.</p>

The Daily Caller has confirmed that Fox News will announce later this afternoon that they have hired long-time Washington Post columnist George Will. Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2013/10/01/fox-news-hires-george-will/#ixzz2gVP0UiZp

"I've lived in Washington now for 44 years, and that's a lot of folly to witness up close," says Washington Post columnist George Will. "Whatever confidence and optimism I felt towards the central government when I got here on January 1, 1970 has pretty much dissipated at the hands of the government." "In part, I owe my current happiness to Barack Obama," continues the 72-year-old Will, who "so thoroughly concentrates all of the American progressive tradition and the academic culture that goes with it, that he's really put the spring in my step."More recently Will has become a champion of...

On Jan. 20, 1981, Michael Deaver, a political aide, peered into a bedroom in Blair House, across from the White House, and said to the man still abed, “It’s 8 o’clock. You’re going to be inaugurated as president in a few hours.” From beneath the blankets, Ronald Reagan said, “Do I have to?” Some are so eager to be inaugurated in 2017 that the 2016 campaign has begun 28 months before the 1.4 percent of Americans who live in Iowa and New Hampshire express themselves. It is, therefore, not too soon to get a head start on being dismayed. Consider two...

President Obama’s increasingly grandiose claims for presidential power are inversely proportional to his shriveling presidency. Desperation fuels arrogance as, barely 200 days into the 1,462 days of his second term, his pantry of excuses for failure is bare, his domestic agenda is nonexistent and his foreign policy of empty rhetorical deadlines and red lines is floundering. And at last week’s news conference he offered inconvenience as a justification for illegality. Explaining his decision to unilaterally rewrite the Affordable Care Act (ACA), he said: “I didn’t simply choose to” ignore the statutory requirement for beginning in 2014 the employer mandate to...

DETROIT — In 1860, an uneasy Charles Darwin confided in a letter to a friend: “I had no intention to write atheistically” but “I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars.” What appalled him had fascinated entomologist William Kirby (1759-1850): The ichneumon insect inserts an egg in a caterpillar, and the larva hatched from the egg, he said, “gnaws the inside of the caterpillar, and though at last it has devoured almost every part of it except the skin...

On Sunday’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos” on ABC, Washington Post columnist George Will took on proponents of federal assistance for Detroit, which declared bankruptcy earlier this month. According to Will, the city isn’t undergoing a fiscal crisis, but is facing a much more serious cultural one, which is the source of its woes. “Can’t solve the problems because the problems are cultural,” Will said. “You have a city, 139 square miles. You can graze cattle in vast portions of it. Dangerous herds of feral dogs roam in there. You have 3 percent of fourth graders reading at the national...

...Although the Constitution has no Article VIII, the administration acts as though there is one that reads: “Notwithstanding all that stuff in other articles about how laws are made, if a president finds a law politically inconvenient, he can simply post on the White House Web site a notice saying: Never mind.” Never mind that the law stipulates 2014 as the year when employers with 50 full-time workers are mandated to offer them health-care coverage or pay fines. Instead, 2015 will be the year. Unless Democrats see a presidential election coming. This lesson in the Obama administration’s approach to the...

<p>WASHINGTON -- As soon as the Constitution permitted him to run for Congress, Al Salvi did. In 1986, just 26 and fresh from the University of Illinois law school, he sank $1,000 of his own money, which was most of his money, into a campaign to unseat an incumbent Democratic congressman. Salvi studied for the bar exam during meals at campaign dinners.</p>

Johns Hopkins’s And Planned Parenthood’s Troubling Extremism By George F. Will April 5 We know Johns Hopkins University is devoted to diversity, because it says so. Its “Diversity and Inclusion Statement,” a classic of the genre, says the university is “committed to sharing values of diversity and inclusion by recruiting and retaining a diverse group of students.” Hopkins has an Office of Institutional Equity and a “Diversity Leadership Council” that defines “inclusion” as “active, thoughtful and ongoing engagement with each other.” Unless you are a member of Voice for Life (VFL), an antiabortion group. Hopkins’s Student Government Association has denied...

Dr. George Will is a respected social scientist and acclaimed writer, but he’s not a lawyer. And he shows it by suggesting the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) is unconstitutional as the Supreme Court prepares to hear a challenge to that federal statute this week in U.S. v. Windsor. DOMA prevents the federal government from giving federal marital benefits to gay marriages or polygamous marriages, and the Constitution allows Congress to make that judgment. Will has made valuable contributions to the issue of gay marriage. And on a personal note, I’m grateful for Will’s very positive Washington Post column last...

"At CPAC, the Future Looks Libertarian," read a dispatch on Time magazine's website. "CPAC: Rand Paul's Big Moment," proclaimed The Week magazine. Meanwhile, the New York Times headlined its story about the annual conservative political action conference "GOP divisions fester at conservative retreat." George Will, a man who actually knows a thing or two about conservatism, responded to the NYT's use of the word "fester" on ABC News' "This Week." "Festering: an infected wound, it's awful. I guarantee you, if there were a liberal conclave comparable to this, and there were vigorous debates going on there, the New York Times'...

On this Sunday’s broadcast of ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos,” Washington Post columnist George Will criticized a New York Times article by Jim Rutenberg and Richard Stevenson that suggested the Conservative Political Action Conference revealed deep divisions in the conservative movement. “First, here’s The New York Times headline on the CPAC conference: ‘GOP divisions fester at conservative retreat,’” Will said. “Festering an infected wound — it’s awful. I guarantee you, if there were a liberal conclave comparable to this, and there were vigorous debates going on there, The New York Times headline would be ‘Healthy diversity flourishes at the...

On Laura Ingraham’s radio show on Friday, Washington Post columnist George Will took a few digs at the Obama White House for the way it has handled the so-called sequestration crisis. According to Will, the process has shown the public just where President Barack Obama and other liberals are on government and how any reduction is “intolerable.” “I think the sequester argument is extremely useful because it’s very educational for the American public,” Will said. “When the Obama administration increases on average 17 percent the budgets of the domestic agencies that are now facing a 5 percent cut, and they...

Overuse of a word sometimes causes it to lose its meaning. As ugly an insult as being called a “Nazi” once was, in the mind of some Americans who think World War II was fought one hundred years ago, its overuse has caused the word to now connote a “busybody” or a “stickler for rules.” “Soup Nazi” makes this point. As an insult there is no longer any sting in the word “Nazi.” RINO “Republican In Name Only” is an insult whose time has come and gone as well. “RINO” as an insult to Republicans who were not conservatives, or...

Syndicated columnist George Will, appearing Sunday on ABC’s “This Week,” said opposition to same-sex marriage is “quite literally” dying, because opponents tend to be older Americans. “There is something like an emerging consensus. Quite literally, the opposition to gay marriage is dying. It’s old people,” Will said. …

For approaching two weeks, liberal media members have been contorting themselves to make the case the President's victory on Election Day represented a mandate for his agenda. When CNN contributor Donna Brazile tried this on ABC's This Week Sunday, George Will marvelously responded, "Almost every member of John Boehner's caucus won his or her seat by a much bigger margin than Mr. Obama won his renewed term" (video follows with transcript and commentary): Will Schools Brazile on Mandates: Almost Every House Republican Won By Much Bigger Margin Than Obama MARTHA RADDATZ, SUBSTITUTE HOST: Simple math? And is there a mandate?...